The proposed research is to study the role of verbal mediation in problem solving. Initially the research will be restricted to concept identification by both school children and college students. The essential procedure will be to provide verbal pre-training so as to affect the ability of S to code information for storage and subsequent retrieval and possibly affect the S's inner speech while solving a problem. Several representative studies are described to illustrate the research methods to be used, measures to be obtained, and implications for a model of verbal mediation in problem solving.